


Renewal

by ecphrasis



Category: The Lord of the Rings - J. R. R. Tolkien, The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-25
Updated: 2020-05-26
Packaged: 2021-03-03 02:40:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 7,131
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24367438
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ecphrasis/pseuds/ecphrasis
Summary: Elladan and Elrohir must find their way home.
Relationships: Celebrían/Elrond Peredhel, Elladan & Elrohir (Tolkien)
Comments: 10
Kudos: 56





	1. Apocalypse

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Idrils_Scribe](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Idrils_Scribe/gifts).



** Renewal **

** Part One: Apocalypse  
  
** Where on this wild hill alone  
a child watched the evening star,  
let these bits of ash and bone  
rejoin the earth they always were,  
the earth that let her sing her love  
the gift that made the giver  
here on the lonely hill above  
the valley of the river.  
 _On Second Hill_ by Ursula K. LeGuin

Their horses’ swift motion rouses a flock of migrating birds, which peel upwards, into the sky, scattering in all directions. The woods of Lothlórien are vacant, completely deserted. Where the cry of elven-scouts should rise from the watch-trees, where the call that means _kin_ should echo, there is only stillness, and the oppressive heat of late summer. Storm clouds hang low over the distant eastern horizon. The Mallorn are wilting in the heat, and without the strength of Galadriel’s girdle to protect them. Their leaves are not brightly colored, but instead a uniform brown. Instead of drifting down into heaps of pure gold, they hang, limp and lifeless, on the branches.

The smell draws them to her. She’s lying on a small mound, dressed in her simple robes, covered in a black mourning-dress and wearing a fine green cloak. Her hair is streaked with white, and her body swarms with carrion-creatures, flies and gnats and burrowing maggots. The earth writhes with them.

“Should we build a barrow for her?” 

Neither twin will later know for certain who first suggested it. They have come upon her body a few weeks past her death; the creeping rot of mortality already sunk deep into her flesh. Flies buzz above her in a formless, variegated cloud, and the low, oppressive sound of their wings fills the still silence of a desolate Lothlórien.  It is autumn, the world is still warm, but the question chills them nonetheless. Their younger sister’s corpse offers her own answer, lying mute before them. Every so often, the swarm shifts, like a flock of birds in flight, and they catch an uneven image of the contours of her body, the place her cheek once was, her shoulder, her swift calves. 

Why is she here, in elven-land? Why did she not lay herself on the cold breast of her husband, and perish surrounded by her people, her children?

"Would she not want to be buried with Estel?"

“She is here, and it should be as she wills it.”

Elrohir is the first to find the spades. Elladan is the first to turn the dark earth over his sister’s white flesh. The motion disturbs the flies and they buzz indignantly, scattering into Elladan’s own face, clogging up his nose and mouth, and then reforming around Arwen. He cannot cry, because if he cries, the salt-tracks of his tears will make his face sticky, and the flies will seek out the moisture and join themselves to him, and his tears will mix with the meat of his sister’s body in ten thousand thousand tiny gizzards-

He needs not worry on that account. As he and his brother begin the long, slow work of piling up a barrow-mound, sweat breaks from his skin and streams across his flesh, and calls the flies to him, from Arwen. He wraps his cloak around his mouth, as though to shield himself from her mortality.

And Elrohir, beside him, has his cloak drawn up around his mouth, and despite the effort of cutting through sod with a dull spade, of heaving heavy shovels of earth, of stacking the cut earth into neat bricks over the dead queen, he breathes shallowly, because the air smells of death.

Labor interrupts thought, diverts the agony of loss from a ravaged heart to blistering hands and burning shoulders. The ground is not good for barrow-making; the sod crumbles despite their precise cuts, and it requires concentration to ensure that the grave is well-made, enduring. They pause occasionally, to drink water or to sit and rest, and they move away from the oppressive stink of the dead body, and they do not speak. What is there to say? Bright eyed Arwen, lastborn of Elrond’s house, loveliest of all the elves of the east, lies rotting on a hillock. Their sister’s voice is vanished from the world, and they were not there to ease her into the world beyond.

But Elrohir does speak, breaking the long silence, collapsing the fragile peace with his sharp-edged words, when they pause for the evening, requiring sunlight to finish the barrow, and bone-weary from the long hours spent slicing through sod.

“We are always too late.” And Elladan knows the criticism is more internal than external, that the plural is mere habit, that Elrohir blames himself. And Elladan disagrees only in that he knows he shares the blame equally with his brother. And so, because his twin broke the silence with the words they had long ago resolved to put away, to ignore, to avoid, Elladan broaches the other unspoken shadow.

“What purpose is there to being immortal, if it means we can only observe death, and do nothing to stop it?” Talking to his brother is like talking to the voice in his head, he knows what objections will be raised before he finishes his question.

“We’ve aided many who would have perished without our help.”

“And look what that aid has wrought,” Elladan gestures vaguely towards the mound, which is shadowed and ominous in the dark distance. They’ve built a fire despite the heat, because it keeps the bugs away. Elladan knows he’s probed the wound too close to its center, because Elrohir does not respond, and he feels the sinking, guilty feeling in his stomach. To apologize would make it worse, would make his words mean something, so instead, he keeps on. “Arwen’s dead,” he says. His voice doesn’t even quaver, he’s sweated out all his tears. “So what now?”

“We go west.” Elrohir says, as Elladan knew he would. They’ve had this fight inside their heads dozens of times, awaiting this moment, anticipating it, and completely incapable of comprehending what comes after.

“Eldarion’s young yet.” Elladan protests. “We cannot so lightly abandon our blood.”

“So we spend our lives like Father spent his, watching over our mortal sibling’s mortal children, until in twenty generations one of them can wrest away the only thing we love?”

“Father loves us!” Elladan bursts out. He’s wrong to say that, he should know they’re not fighting about _that_ , about Mother, about the past. They don’t talk about the past, what they did, or rather, failed to do.

“He could barely look at us, after.”

“But still, he wouldn’t stop loving us.” Elladan’s words are not contrary, they’re pleading. If Elrohir pushes, Elladan will begin to weep, and if Elladan cries, so will Elrohir, and neither has any tears left. “A parent always loves their children.” And he hates himself for the words that hover at the edge of his tongue and slip out his mouth, words that he knows will wound his brother, words that wound himself, words that may be true, probably are true, but still shouldn’t be said. “But we were never Arwen.”

“Don’t blame Arwen,” Elrohir says. Elladan knows he was harsh, but his brother’s tone grates him nevertheless, because it’s as though he’s angry, furious, and it’s not as though Elladan meant to say Arwen was at fault, and certainly Elrohir could be generous enough to interpret his words the way he means them, not the way they sound. “Arwen didn’t come home with our mother half-dead in her arms. Arwen didn’t tell our father how we found her. Arwen didn’t fail to save her spirit, Arwen didn’t waste time playing games instead of hunting orcs. Arwen didn’t-”

“We did what we could,” Elladan says. That’s the problem with fighting with his brother; they always end up arguing the opposite of what they started, because neither can bear to see the other hurt.

“Not enough,” Elrohir says.

“No,” Elladan agrees.There’s silence a moment, and Elladan knows his brother is imagining their mother, all body, scarcely any spirit, closer to death than any brave warrior would dream of coming, and yet somehow still drawing an uneven, rasping breath from her mouth into her lungs. They hadn’t seen an ambush before, they hadn’t even known orcs took prisoners. By the time they realized they were dealing with creatures that approached sentience, and not the dumb brutes they’d learned to slaughter, they’d spent long days harassing them, shadows in the evening light, making a game out of killing. By the time they found the cave, found the bodies of their kin, found their mother, it had been weeks. And still, she drew harsh, uneven breaths into her lungs. She’d been unclothed, uncovered, laid bare. They hadn’t known orcs, even orcs, to be capable of such cruelty. Then again, they'd proved themselves almost as vicious. They'd become a terror, a byword for death, the twin sons of Elrond, vowed always to vengeance, determined to remedy their mother's violation.

And what had they done to remedy it? Bundled their mother up in their cloaks, and ridden southward for Imladris, believing their omniscient father could heal all wounds with a touch.

But not that wound. Not her. They’d brought back a husk of their mother, a creature with wide, staring eyes and a fearful visage, who accused them mutely with her overwhelming, all-consuming terror. Their father had wept until his face was red and his cheeks were raw from salt-water, and he’d never turned them away, never raised even the suggestion of guilt to them. But they’d known all the same. Had their father found their mother in the cave, perhaps he could have healed her. He wouldn’t have fed her ineffectual broth, and dragged her down the mountain for another to heal. He would have known what to do.

“Elladan,” Elrohir says. Each twin meets the other’s eyes, finds their features mirrored. 

“Elrohir,” Elladan says. 

“He told us the choice would not wait forever. That we would have a reprieve, but not for long.” He’d never pushed them to choose, always given them time, space, years to spend in youth and idleness, but once Elladan and Elrohir and heard him talking to their mother, speaking in a hushed, low voice of his certainty that they were doomed to suffer the sundering that he and Elros endured. They knew he saw the things that would be. They heard the agony in his voice. They'd sworn to each other that they'd never part, but what good are oaths when visions are involved?

“What is there west of the world?”

“What is there here?”

“We are born to this land, not some foreign shore. We know the mountain passes and the swift rivers, we know hunting and fishing and the old songs.”

“We are eternal,” Elrohir says. “We are not born to death, and this land is a dead land, or one dying.”

“Arwen has gone into the world beyond, alone,” Elladan says. “She is there without her kinsmen, separated from her people. Imagine her loneliness. Would you want to wander an unknown world, alone, without your kin to comfort you? We owe Arwen our duty.”

“Our parents have gone west alone,” Elrohir says. “Would you deprive our father of all his children, when we never bade him farewell? Would you have our mother’s last memory of her sons be one of torment? We owe our parents our duty.”

“So we’re agreed,” Elladan says. His twin wears bright mail beneath his grey cloak, and as the fire shifts shadows around, occasionally he sees his own face distorted in the armor. When they were younger, they used to spin round in circles, and then, still dizzy, race to a clear pool and try to determine which of the spinning faces was their own, and which their brother’s. They once built a mirror-frame and set it up in a well-trafficked hallway, and they'd pretended it really existed by perfectly mirroring each other's movements.

“Yes,” Elrohir says. His words are faint. They have always been together. Even when they hated themselves, even when they hated each other, they have always dwelt as two sides of one soul, inseparable. When they were younger, their father had shown them how to cut an apple open, slicing it in half so the seed-star shone through the fruit’s flesh. What star will shine out from their sundering? “We’re agreed.”

There are no words that remain to be said. They sit before the fire and stare into its swirling depths. Shapes conjure themselves from shadows, sounds from splitting logs. The embers glow hot, and then run to ash. The sun peaks over the horizon, and then leaps upwards, drowning the world in the pink light of early morning. When their mother had been in labor with Arwen, their father had sent them to oversee construction of a bridge, because the she was three months early, and Celebrían was injured by a fall. They’d kissed their mother’s sweaty forehead, and held her, delirious in her pain, and gone out, half convinced they’d return to find the citadel draped in black, and their father holding their mother’s body. They knew death only from the stories, then.

But Arwen, after a long, difficult labor, had come red and squalling into the world, and from their spot over the river ford, the twins had heard the bells tolling in great, ringing peals, announcing their sister’s birth. They’d raced each other back, vying to be the first to hold her.

They do not need to speak to build her barrow. They are experienced enough in piling up the graves of the kings of Westernesse. They have buried hundreds of their kinsfolk before. Arwen still stinks of rot, but covered in dirt, the flies have dissipated. They mound the sod over her body, and enclose her flesh beneath the earth, as though by sealing her into a womb they could ensure her rebirth. 

When they place the last sod-brick, they stand on opposite sides of the barrow and observe their handiwork. It’s a small thing, simple, unornamented, just large enough to hide her body. It rises to the height of their heads. It’s well made; despite the poverty of the earth, it won’t collapse in a storm. When they’d brought their mother back, everyone had thought she’d perish. The stone mason had even carved her a tomb in the foundation of Imladris, and spelled out her name and her long lineage. When she’d recovered, and chosen to go west, their father had spent days chiseling her name out of the rock, leaving the tomb unclaimed. But Arwen’s ligaments were torn away, her muscles atrophied by carrion. They could not lay her in the roots of their city, shut up in stone, not when she’d chosen to perish in the fading summer of Lothlórien. 

There’s a prayer for elven souls, and one for mortals. Elladan sings the former in Quenya, their father’s tongue. Elrohir chants the latter in Adûnaic. Their voices meet and clash; there is no harmony between the songs, and they realize with despair that they have made a cacophony, and not a pleasing hymn. But neither twin relents, and so the music spirals from them, out into the barren woods of withering mallorn. 

The final note slips into harmony, and the songs end joined together. Neither twin can remember, in that moment, whether they have altered the music to fit together, to offer some semblance of resolution, or whether the songs were accurately sung. 

What is there to say to Arwen? Elrohir searches but cannot find any phrase of comfort. Elladan touches her grave and does not speak. 

“Sister,” Elrohir begins. There is no answer, no river-quick speech pouring from her lips, no smile turned up to greet him. His sweat drips onto her grave, seeps into her soil. He prays that it will be enough.

“You should find our grandfather and go,” Elladan says, at last.

“And you?”

“I will go east, to Gondor, to Eldarion and the girls.”

Their eyes meet. Three thousand years of life, all spend together, as closely joined as the monstrous farm-animals that are sometimes born with one body and two heads. Now, at last, is the time for the surgeon’s scalpel to separate them, so that one may perish for the other to survive.

“Give my greetings to our kin,” Elrohir says. Elladan feels the atom-split in his heart, the hairline crack of separation, the widening gulf.

“And mine to Mother and Father.” Elrohir has already turned away, to saddle his horse and ride south to Imladris, over the cold mountains, alone.

They have watched the night sky for so many centuries that they have seen even the most stalwart stars shift in their courses. They have buried hundreds of the men of Westernesse, felled by an arrow or a wound or even the riddling rot of old age. They have lived long ages in all the elven kingdoms, amongst men, alone in the wilderness.

Arwen’s barrow rises like an accusation in the night.

“Wait,” Elrohir says. His brother has mounted his horse, he has turned his face towards the south. “Elladan, wait.”

“There is no opportune moment for farewell,” his twin says. “Goodbye does not grow easier. Let me go, Elrohir.” His voice is thick with unshed tears.

“Arwen is dead,” Elrohir says. “Our people are gone, our world has ended.”

“Our blood still lives.”

“I am your blood, your brother. I will not leave you here.”

“Elrohir, we cannot permit mother and father to lose all of us.”

“Then come with me. Come west with me, come home.” Elladan meets his brother’s eyes. He looks at Arwen, covered up with earth, her beauty hidden from all future eyes, her self decayed to dust and maggots. His brother’s eyes are bright and boundless, immortal, not yet quenched of hope. “She would not want us to be parted. Even if it means her children must endure their world alone. She wound not have her choice become ours.” Elrohir is right, Elladan knows. But to lose his sister, his dear younger sibling, the infant child he promised to protect, feels like tearing out his heart. “Brother,” Elrohir says. "Please."

Arwen’s grave is well made. In springtime the grass will grow over it, and the wildflowers sink their roots into the sun-warmed soil. The tress will fall around it, but they will not break through the sod house over her body. The worms will turn her into dust, her memory will be ground out by the insistent heel of mortality. Elladan and Elrohir ride south, and the light rain that blows in from the east mingles with the tears on their faces, and blurs the afternoon sun to ten thousand bright halos round their eyes.

They do not look back. 


	2. Genesis

** Part Two: Genesis  
**   
This is not something that can be renounced,  
it must renounce.

It lets go of me,  
and I open like a hand  
cut off at the wrist.

(It is the arm  
feels pain

But the severed hand  
the hand clutches at freedom)  
 _Circe/Mud Poems_ by Margaret Atwood  


They are glad there are two of them; it makes the strange city feel almost like home. Alone, they would have no respite from the curious questions of their kin, the overwhelming welcome, the great merriment, the flashing eyes and gesturing hands and bright, swirling robes seemingly woven from fluid gemstones. At least together, they can find their twin’s eyes in their twin’s face, and snatch a moment of peace and certainty before another name from legend greets them with open arms. 

They are their father’s sons. They do not enjoy being made much of. Despite this, their father has thrown this revel, the greatest since he founded his city, and he has summoned every elf who shares even a drop of their blood, and bade them all dance in his children’s honor. The High King is present, Finarfin their great-grandfather, and his wife, and all his children. Olwë, King of Alqualondë, has come with his vast retinue of pearl-clad elves, and Gil-Galad is present, and Turgon, and Finrod, and their grandmother, the great Elwing. Had they not been forced, in their childhood, to memorize the faces of their ancestors by drawing them on heavy vellum, Elladan and Elrohir would have no hope of recalling all whom they encounter. 

Each new elf is dressed more resplendently than the last, each shining robe or dress is outdone by one that gleams brighter, and the twin sons of Elrond of Imladris, the wanderers, the warriors, the Aids-of-Men, the Orc-Terrors, the grey fiends of the north, the ghost-bows, are right in the center of the commotion, dressed in their supple leather hunting boots, their boiled leather armor, and their silver chainmail, strengthened by mithril and adamant. 

Arwen with her natural radiance would belong amidst the stunning elegance of the revel. They, still fresh from the wilderness, are like a dark patch of mold on a whitewashed wall, a blight against the bright colors and bright smiles of their kin.

At some point shortly after midnight on the third full day of the festival, after the miruvor is handed out (more of the drink than they’d ever seen in their entire lives, more than was ever stored in the vast cellars of Imladris), and the elves are grown bleary-eyed, and half-drawn into their waking dreams, Elladan and Elrohir finally manage to slip out from the blossoming, serpentine gardens, the labyrinthine trees, up to an overlook that permits them to see the valley that cradles their father and mother’s thriving citadel.

It’s a vast city, at least double the size of Imladris, and carved solidly from stone. It rises high above the mountain, and peaks in a gleaming, gold-encrusted tower that shimmers even in the moonlight. It sprawls the length of the valley, like two open arms, and no wall surrounds it, and no watchtowers have been built into the rock. It shimmers like the still sea does beneath a full moon and a sky of gleaming stars.

“It would be a nightmare to defend,” Elrohir says. He’s snitched a bottle of fine red wine, and he and his brother take turns drinking from it. It’s stronger than even the wine Thranduil kept in his cellars, and this is their sixth, or maybe seventh, bottle since the moon rose. Their heads spin in the starlight, and the music gives a meter to their thoughts.

“We’d need to dig a trench,” Elladan says. His brother snorts.

“What, around the entire city? You’re mad. I’d make it a decoy city, and build my real city on a different island.”

“Now who’s mad?” Elladan protests. “Who ever heard of a decoy city?”

“Who ever heard of miruvor handed out in barrels, not in sips?”

“You know the stories the Dúnedain told, about elf-barrows and lost years, how you could dance in a revel for one night and wake up a century later?”

“I was thinking of them too,” Elrohir says. “It’s disquieting to see such opulence. I suppose it’s not wrong; there’s no hunger here, no want.” He gestures with the bottle towards the sparkling city. “The fucking buildings are built from fucking diamond dust.”

“You’re drunk.”

“No more than you.”

“Then you’re very drunk.”

“Is this really the end of everything? All the blood and the death and the orc-hunting in the darkness, with our hearts in our throats, and the injuries and the fear and the anger and the long droughts and the funerals and the dead children? It ends in a pretty party in a pretty city, where everyone’s fucking drunk or getting there?”

“Looks like it,” Elladan says. He takes a long swig from the bottle, shakes it, and sighs when he hears only a slight sloshing sound. They’ll need another one or two to get truly inebriated, but to get the bottles, they’ll have to slip back amongst the partiers. He hands the bottle to his brother, who finishes it, and contemplates the blown green glass.

“I thought it would be different.” He chucks the bottle as far as he can throw it, but the glass is designed to be impervious, so it only hits the ground with an unsatisfying clunk.

“Me too,” Elladan says. "But this isn't so bad."

“I thought it would mean something,” Elrohir says. The music has turned into a lament, a song about winter and the bitter famines that for most are a distant memory. He can remember starving as a child, when the fields could grow no wheat and the woods were empty of game. “I thought it would all mean something! But it doesn’t, it fucking doesn’t, nothing means anything!” Elladan realizes a little too late that his brother isn’t just talking, he’s sobbing, he’s almost screaming. “It doesn’t mean anything! Why doesn’t it-“ And Elladan cradles his brother’s head to his chest, and feels the sobs that tear through his body, shaking him down to his bones. He hasn’t cried like this in years, and Elladan cannot comfort him, because normally when they weep, they weep together. Elladan has not felt his brother’s awful realization that his life has been meaningless. He has felt only a deepening exhaustion at the endless parade of new faces, and a deepening interest in the lovely elves who turn invitingly around him, and meet his eyes with a coy smile. He’d been prepared for the fête to end in the bed of a particularly friendly elf, drowning himself in the solace of the flesh, and, as always, skirting the inviolate Laws of his people. He’d expected his brother to, at some point, separate himself from his side and find his own companion, a bright-eyed poet, or some engaging scholar, or some lute-mouthed singer with sad eyes. (Valar know he knows his brother’s type, having been exposed to enough of his heartbreaks) He’d not thought his brother was truly upset.

“Elrohir,” he says. “Elrohir, why are you crying?” 

“I would rather have gone to be with Arwen than spend the rest of eternity getting drunk on wine more costly than some men’s kingdoms.”

“Elrohir,” Elladan says. But he does not feel his pain, and so he does not know how to lessen it. “It will not always be like this.”

His brother holds him, clutches him as though he’s afraid that in letting go, they’ll lose each other, but when the music shifts from a lament to a ballad, he seems to come to a decision. His racking sobs ease, and he sits upright and smiles.

“Let’s go back, Elladan,” Elrohir says. “I saw you looking at the warriors, and I saw one in particular looking at you.”

“I know when you’re pretending.”

“I just want to go back and watch the revelers. I haven’t the head for thinking about anything now.”

“Alright,” Elladan says. “We’ll talk about this later.”

“It’s just a momentary lapse, a bit of delayed sorrow,” Elrohir says. “I’m fine, truly. I’m glad to be here, with you. I’d be wretched if you’d stayed behind, but as it is, I couldn’t be happier.” Elladan is not convinced, but the music is inviting, and his head is spinning with drink and the intoxicating lure of the revel, and he desperately wants to stop thinking, if only for a few days. He wants to lose himself in someone’s willing body, and lose his thoughts in his cups, and forget the cold nights and the long hunts and the burning revenge that has eaten a hole in his heart, and taught him the easily assumed burden of hatred.

When they were younger, their father forced them to walk barefoot through the bitter winters and the hot, humid summers, to toughen the soles of their feet and to make them accustomed to enduring hardship with ease. Their feet had first cracked, and then blistered, and then bled, and then formed callouses to protect them from the pain. When a battle had gone wrong, and their soldiers had been ambushed and they’d been forced to flee on foot, they’d managed the long march with ease, secure in their leather boots and used to swift passage without rest, while the men they fought with reduced their feet to bloody pulps which had to be cut from their boots, when at last they reached safety. So too the hatred that they fostered for the orcs and other wicked creatures of the world, steeling themselves to endure the killing at first, and later finding it easy, almost pleasurable. 

They meander back through the gardens, and although Elladan is attentive to his brother, he sees no outward sign of distress, and eventually, he finds himself dancing with a distant kinswoman, who suggests they find a secret spot, and he cannot will himself to raise any objections. He leaves Elrohir to the revel, and momentarily forgets death. 

* * *

Shortly after dawn, Elrohir drags himself away from his hiding spot amidst a copse of trees, slips through the careless merrymakers, and up into the city proper. His parents have given them only a brief tour, but he knows their tastes, and while the city is much larger than Imladris, he trusts himself to find his father’s solar. He’s proved correct when he comes to an oak door burned with his father’s sigil, and he steels himself against his rising terror, and he knocks. His father is always dutiful, always laboring for his people. He will not permit himself to celebrate for days on end, even as he encourages others to do the same.

He hears his father shuffling papers, and he hears his light tread, and he hears the slight squeak of the heavy hinges, and finds himself face to face with the lord of the city. They’re of an even height, with the same dark hair and grey eyes. Were it not for the roundness of their mother’s face, they would look identical to their father. He drops his father’s gaze almost at once, and looks respectfully at the floor.

“Elrohir!” His father exclaims. Even his mother has, on occasion, mistaken one of them for the other, but his father tells them apart as easily as he might tell Arwen from Galadriel. Elrohir watches closely, to see if he is irritated by the interruption, or made uncomfortable by his son’s presence, but his father gives no hint of annoyance. He flings his door open wide, and gestures for him to enter. “I didn’t expect you at this hour.” He probes the words for any sign that he is unwelcome, and when he finds none, he feels compelled to ask.

“If I’m interrupting, my lord-“

“Elrohir,” his father says, his tone chastising. “You’re not interrupting. Sit down.”

“Thank you,” he says.

“Where’s your brother?” Elrond looks behind Elrohir, as though Elladan may materialize up the staircase. Elrohir waves his hand vaguely in the direction of the sleeping quarters.

“He’s otherwise occupied.”

“No mournful poet or musician caught your eye?” His father uses the masculine endings, and Elrohir feels his blood chill in his veins. He should have known better than to come, he should have known that he would only shame his father further.

“I saw no need to tarry with anyone,” Elrohir responds stiffly, and he emphasizes the feminine pronoun.

“Elrohir,” his father says. “Your brother may slip easily enough between men and women, but I’ve never known you to love the latter, unless you found one in the century since we’ve last seen each other.” Elrohir can feel his heart in his throat, beating the staccato pattern of guilt and terror that he’d long ago assumed he’d outgrown. The oak door behind him is shut, else he might consider fleeing through it, out away from the city, and into the trackless lands in the far west, that unfold endlessly.As it is, he has only his words to mollify his father’s pride.

“I apologize for my indiscretion, my lord.”

“Elrohir, I’m not censuring you, I’m not angry. Ecthelion and Glorfindel maintain a joint household here, I would not spurn you for doing likewise. I meant a jest, that’s all.” Elrohir does not trust himself to accept his father’s words, but he has no wish to discuss the topic further, so he allows the conversation to shift. His father asks, carefully, after the old world, after Imladris, and Elrohir attempts to spare him the awful knowledge of the city’s abandonment, the dispersal of the elves, the desolate and inhospitable valley home only to the wailing wind. “What brings you to me during your revel, my son?” Elrond asks. Elrohir senses he must be unwelcome, an invasion, an interruption, but he cannot bring himself to leave his father to his work. He has not spoken so freely with him in centuries, and he will not work up the courage to do so again for a while, and thus far there have been no accusations of guilt. Perhaps his father is aware of how heavy the burden of his mother’s wounding lies on his conscience, and has no wish to add to it.

“My lord, I-“

“You needn’t be so formal, Elrohir,” his father says. “You’re not my courtier, you’re my child. I don’t need your honorifics.”

“I apologize.” It is easier to talk to his father if he views him merely as the disembodied arbiter of justice. If he keeps his gaze respectfully downcast, if he uses the appropriately removed address, if he regards him as a distant, unapproachable lord, it is almost simple to avoid looking into his eyes, to ignore the wounded hurt, the guilt, the anger at their mother’s absence. Elrohir breathes, steadying himself, and begins anew. “Father, I would ask your aid.”

“Of course, my son.”

“Father I-“ despite himself, he feels the clogging, swollen mass of tears in the back of his throat, and he hates himself for his weakness, his idiocy. What did his father do to deserve so useless a son, ineffective and incapable of pleasing him? “Father, I do not know how to be here.” The words sound ridiculous, even to him. He cannot help but question why he dragged himself up endless flights of stairs, and into his busy father’s study, to plague the poor lord of the city with a child’s questions. His father looks at him a moment, appraising him, and just as he is about to apologize, his father speaks.

“Elrohir,” he says. “I did not know how to be here either.” Elrohir cannot help the skepticism that surges through him. His father has always been perfectly accustomed to his life, his father has never made mistakes or poor choices, he has always known his place and his duty, and always fulfilled it. His father was born for immortality, for the long life of the elven. Some of his doubt must flash across his face, because his father sighs. “I can see you don’t believe me, but it’s true, my son. I chose to become immortal when I was still very young, and when I had no real understanding of my choice’s gravity. Coming here was very difficult for me. Even talking with your mother was challenging. I found myself regretting my choice, wishing I could go back, could choose again, could dwell with Arwen instead of living a life of undeserved opulence and leisure.” For the first time, Elrohir meets his father’s eyes with his own. The omnipresent guilt and rage and suffering has been replaced with compassion and tenderness.

“It’s been the same for me,” Elrohir says. “Not for Elladan.” 

“He always had your mother’s temperament,” his father says. “They’re both more easy-going, more capable of accepting the novel and releasing the past. You and I, however, are different. We get wrapped up in our thoughts, and we struggle to escape them.” This is the second time that he has mentioned his wife, and he has said it without any rancor or bitterness. Elladan feels the familiar surge of bile-bitter guilt, and flinches at the memory of his mother, naked, weeping in his arms. “Elrohir,” his father says. “Neither you no your brother have spoken more than a few words to me in the weeks since you’ve come home. Have I wounded you?”

“Wounded us?” Elrohir asks. The question has thrown him off balance, he can barely begin to answer it. “Wounded us? Father, no, of course not.”

“Then, my son, why such distance?”

“Father-“ Elrohir pauses, as his rhetoric teachers taught him to do, and searches for the words that fit his reasoning. “Father, we are both aware of the blood-guilt on our heads. We know we wronged our mother, wronged you, and we are glad to be here, but we have no wish to impose.”

“Blood guilt?” His father sound shocked, unbelieving. “What blood guilt?”

“You know, Father,” he says. 

“This is about Caradhras, still?”

“I cannot close my eyes without seeing her as we found her!” He bursts out. He is flushed with shame, with anger, and even the knowledge that he has wrought the doom of many thousands of orcs cannot ease his awful guilt.

“You have never been at fault,” his father says. “I regret that you ever felt like you were. Evil things were done by evil creatures in the old world, Elrohir. We have enough sins of our own without adopting those of others. I told you this, long ago, when you first brought her to me. My answer has not changed in the intervening years.” Elrohir contemplates the truth of these words, weights his father’s sincerity with his own certainty that he is to blame. “My son,” his father says, gently, kindly. “I know what it is to be so bound up in webs of guilt that you can find no hope of escape. But I know too how lightly one can go, being free of those constraints. It took me years to find peace with all I did and failed to do in the old world. But I have found it, and I am happy. Here, that possibility exists for you too.”

“How?” Elrohir whispers. “How can you live in a city without walls, and even dream of peace?”

“It was your mother’s idea,” Elrond says. “And I do not deny, the first few years I could not rest, for fear that some army would sweep down on us and savage our holdings. But the world here is different than the world back east, and there is no reason to fear. You will come to understand, eventually. It will not happen all at once, but your guilt and your terror will gradually melt away, like snow in the springtime sun, and what is left will be hope and joy, and you will be happy.”

“Truly?” 

“Truly.” Elrohir thinks of the time his father took him and his brother out into the woods, shortly after their first hunt. He’d marched them through the forest, running them through drills, forcing them to keep their feet sure and their arms ready, and when they’d heard a low groaning in the distance, he’d left them in the undergrowth (like a doe leaves her twin fawns, her sole world-burden, when she scents danger on the air) and gone to see what made it.

They sat for a long time, at first enjoying the opportunity to catch their breath and rest their feet, and then growing increasingly bored and quarrelsome. As the sun slid over its zenith and began its long descent, from the corner of his eye, Elladan had seen a movement in the bushes, a faint flickering, and they’d both frozen, feeling for the first time in their lives the sheer terror of the unknown. 

A snake, twice as long as they were tall, and covered in awful, bright-gleaming scales slithered from its den and into the sunlight, where it stretched to its full length and absorbed the heat of the autumn day. And then, turning, it had caught sight of them, and it had risen up on its belly until its slitted yellow eyes were level with theirs, and it had hissed, tasting the air with its forked tongue, and they had watched its sinuous muscles bunch, and Elrohir had known that the snake was going to strike, was going to sink its fangs into them and-

but then an arrow pierced through the snake’s eye, and their father almost flew over the fifty yards from where he’d paused to shoot, and he picked up the snake by its fearsome mouth, and they saw that he was white with fury.

“Am I a father to cowards?” He had asked, coldly. “What would you have done if I had not appeared? This snake kills with a single bite, even elves, especially children. The world has no mercy for us, so we must have no mercy for it. Skin the snake and clean it as you’ve been taught.” And they had done so, holding back their tears, aware for the first time that their father was not always kind.

“I often fear I was too harsh on you and your brother,” his father says, as though he somehow knew his thoughts. “I pray you will forgive me, my son. I did what I was able to do, but your mother was always more suited to raising children than I.”

“Father, no,” Elrohir says. “I know we were often not the sons you wished you had, but you did well by us.”

“I am proud to call you members of my house,” Elrond says. His voice has the thick burr of deep emotion, and Elrohir finds no hint of falsehood in his words. He embraces his father, and his father holds him tightly, just as the dawn light sifts through the high window. “And I am so happy that you are home.”

Home is a strange word, for Elrohir. When he was younger it meant the walled garden where he played with Elladan, and when he grew older, it meant the sunlit halls of Imladris, were young Arwen babbled Sindarin interspersed with Quenya. Older still, and home was with the war-bands of the Dúnedain, avenging their wounded mother, and beyond that, the failing elven forests that he and Elladan wandered together, watching the passage of their kin from the world.

For the first time in many, he imagines that home might be a place he can return to, and he feels the grief and guilt in his heart loosen, like a bowstring loosens when an excess of pressure snaps it in two. He sits with his father, and they talk of plans to expand his great city, and Elrohir feels no shame when he meets his father's eyes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My heartfelt thanks to Idrils_Scribe, who spurred me into writing this story, and to all of you, for reading it.


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